T.S Eliot's View On Aesthetic Values

What ultimately lasts in writing is anything with aesthetics. T.S.
Eliot and Virginia Woolf agree that there are aesthetic values in writings.
They have similar backgrounds regarding knowledge in English literary
tradition that they are able to draw from, but their definitions of
aesthetics seem to collide head on which creates the problem among these
two writers.
T.S Eliot has a firm view on aesthetic values. He relies heavily
on the father tongues of Greek and Latin that was known by those who could
read in the Middle Ages as well as the great writers of his time.
According to Eliot people with knowledge in this father tongue were the
educated as well as the upper class. Also it was ...

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a feeling that the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order." He mostly talks to the educated male and beauty for
him is found in these great writers of his time. He also say's, " In a
peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by
the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not
judged to be good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not
judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in
which two things are measured by each other."
Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, does not have a set of defined
criteria as Eliot does to define aesthetic values. Woolf, unlike Eliot, is
interested in the mother tongue. This was the source of Woolf's culture,
and she learned it from living it. This was the language spoken by the
common people during the time of Chaucer. These common people were not the
elite by any means most all were ...

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